My Father's Garden
by Mimi Dear
Summary: Sakura loved her father and the garden they cared for very much, but she's only just realizing it.


This is sort of based on my life... I lost my dad when I was twelve to prostate cancer. He and I really liked to do gardening stuff together, and recently I was working on our backyard and this is what it felt like.

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Sakura is very proud of her flower garden, but she misses her father. A lot.

Though things had not started off well that morning, Sakura looked out of the window she was sitting by and admired the warmth of the day, one of the few that were emerging from this bare winter season. The new year had passed and life hadn't really changed, except that she had survived. Points for breathing.

Changing quickly from her pajamas and camisole into an old pair of stained jeans and a warm, long-sleeved shirt, she grabbed her sneakers and headed into her back yard. It wasn't much; maybe 500 feet of grass, trees, and half-alive flower beds lining the small, blue house she and her mother lived in. As she tightened the laces on her shoes, she noted to herself which plants she would plant where. Daffodils at the south end, snapdragons in the sun, along the white fence, Icelandic poppies near the kitchen window...

Gathering up her short, soft pink hair and pulling it into a tight ponytail, she clipped her bangs straight back from her face (ghostlike hairline be damned) and set to acquiring the necessary items from the small garden shed bumped up against the back fence.

She sighed weakly and shivered a bit as she looked at the items piled up inside the shed. Boxes of stuffed animals, baby clothes, her father's power tools, yearbooks, school awards, a broken lawn mower, shelves filled with bags of fertilizer, packets of seeds for gardens... masses of stuff that would probably never be used now.

Sakura missed her father. He had died three years prior, when she was twelve, of a slow-moving but highly undetectable cancer. They hadn't realized anything was wrong until he began acting strangely at times and complaining of pain. They took him to the doctor, and instead of it being a quickly remedied illness, Sakura and her mother were informed that he had, at most, six months to live- the cancer had spread to his brain. She could remember feeling nothing at that moment; and wondering if that was bad.

With a little choking sob, she remembered how the beautiful garden they had made over the years, just filled to the brim with roses and healthy grass and daisies and little white flowers and chives and cilantro and orange trees and oh just everything, and how it had all begun to die when he did. When he went into the clinic in the city for treatment, how tired he was afterwards, and how wilted the flowers had seemed. How their colors were duller, their leaves and flowers limp.

Gathering up the packs of ready-to-be-planted flowers that she had bought from the nursery on her way home from school, she admired the rosy curves of the snapdragons, and smiled gently to herself as an image of her father, dark red hair like fire in the warm spring sun, appeared in her mind, and pinched a pink snapdragon along the jaws, causing the mouth to open up in a gaping manner, and roughly gave her a rub on the head with one of his calloused hands, laughing the deep, cackling chuckle she could barely remember.

She knew that she glorified him. She knew there had been times when he frustrated her, when she wished that maybe he wasn't around. But there were so many good things, so many good things that outweighed everything else. The times when he taught her songs that his parents had sung to him a child, or songs he had memorized in grade school. When he praised her for her strength at being better than the boys, or admired her for wearing a beautiful dress.

Pulling one tall snapdragon from its plastic encasement, and gently tousling the firm square of the white roots so that some hung loose, she mildly noticed her hands; milky white, soft and tender, and her long nails, painted a deep shade of blue. She mindlessly scolded herself for being so weak as to pride herself on this femininity.

He had taught her how to do this. How to care for things. She had been raised in a home full of creatures; dogs, tamed rodents, birds, fish, amphibians, reptiles, insects. There was no creature, he said, that you should fear. Even the rattlesnake and the black widow spider kill only to defend themselves. She broke reminiscing to smirk at the memory of Akamaru letting out a most fearful growl at Naruto (as Akamaru was practically the size of a pony, and still growing), and how surprised Kiba had been when she had been able to soothe the animal by scratching him swiftly on the rump. Akamaru had melted, and followed her around faithfully for the entire day, hoping for another back rub.

Carefully digging out a small hole in the moist, dark earth, she broke up several of the clumps of drier dirt and poured a bit of water into the hole by way of a nearby water hose. She placed the delicate root end of the deep red colored flower into the earth and carefully began smoothing the dirt around the base of the plant. Sakura could feel the soil getting into her nails and grinding on her skin, but she didn't care.

Wiping the sweat from her brow with the back of her hand, she smiled to herself and grinned. For the next three hours, she planted tenderly and watered and tore weeds from the earth, soil and sand grinding on her skin and her knees red from being leaned on. It was a bit painful, as most physical work is, but she loved it. So many memories came back, and she laughed at them even if they weren't very funny.

Pulling out a tumbleweed bush, and brushing away the dirt from a rough, thick slab of brick, she let out a surprised gasp, mild and weak and too surprised to really be anything that anyone could hear. Her fingers fumbled over the stone, and in shock, her fingers ran over the lettering ingraved in the faded red stone. It was the name of the first dog her parents had ever gotten specifically for her, a puppy from the pound named Lucille.

A large grey mutt, Lucille had been, large enough to knock over Sakura and anyone she knew. Large enough for the little girl to ride like a pony (not that she had ever been allowed). The wonderful dog had been so healthy and so happy. She and Sakura would roam the rolling lands around their home for the entire afternoon on weekends, chasing after ground squirrels and running and sometimes eating lunch atop one of the stout hills.

Sakura picked a daisy from the small, potted bush she held in her hands, and placed it, gently, on the dog's grave. When Lucille had died, she knew, just entirely knew that this was a part of her childhood that was leaving her, forever. Lucille wasn't like a Barbie doll; she couldn't be put into storage and retrieved later for reminiscing. Lucille was gone. Any reminiscing was sure to be hard, just as hard as the beautiful dog's grave.

Looking over her work in the yard, clearly improved, she let out a contented sigh. The sun was setting behind her, and the garden caught the oranges, reds, and pinks. A somewhat blooming apricot tree in the corner especially interpreted the rays of the sun.

It was at that moment that fifteen year-old Sakura Haruno decided that Lucile's final resting place, her father's garden- no, their garden, meant much, much more to her than anything else.


End file.
